Ahmed al Afifi, the Palestinian intelligence chief, nervously fingered a .45 pistol in his Gaza City home hours after it was hit with two Hamas mortars.


Hamas gunmen take up position during clashes with members
of Fatah security force in the Gaza strip yesterday


The first round blew a crater in his driveway. The second, a dud, stuck in his flower bed like a garden ornament.

"Hamas is trying to take control of everything," Mr Afifi said after the fighting had raged all night.

Hamas has been locked in a bloody power struggle with the rival Fatah party ever since it won a landslide parliamentary election in January last year. After months of on/off violence, the stalemate between the militant Islamists and the ousted Fatah moderates seemed destined to keep the Palestinian government paralysed.

Now, Hamas is pressing a fierce offensive in the Gaza Strip, systematically laying siege to the Fatah-dominated security services and looking at last for the decisive victory that could give it complete control of the Palestinian government.

The Fatah security services ruled the streets here for 15 years but are now holed up in fortified bunkers and a handful of neighbourhoods awaiting a threatened fully-fledged assault by Hamas.

The unprecedented surge of violence threatens to topple the Palestinian unity government less than three months after it was formed.

The president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, has accused Hamas of staging a coup attempt and vainly called for a truce.

But the Hamas mortars continued to whistle overhead throughout the day, pounding into Mr Abbas's presidential compound in Gaza City.

Mr Abbas was safe in the West Bank city of Ramallah, but his Fatah loyalists fought back.

They fired a rocket propelled grenade at the home of Ismail Haniyeh, the prime minister and Hamas leader, just north of Gaza City and used armoured personnel carriers with high calibre cannons for the first time in this power struggle. Hamas has staked out claims to large swaths of the Gaza Strip, declaring northern and central Gaza to be "closed military zones", evoking a measure the Israeli army uses to cordon off areas during operations against militants.

"Stay at home and you will be safe," Hamas warned Fatah fighters in an announcement over a radio station.

As reports poured in of Hamas victories across the war-torn territory, Fatah insisted that the tide would quickly turn once the order was given to launch a counter attack.

Fatah's leaders said they were showing restraint in the hopes of avoiding a fully-fledged civil war.


Palestinian women react after senior Fatah leader Jediyan was killed during fighting


"We are just waiting for the orders from our leaders and then we will vanquish Hamas and they will learn a lesson they will never forget," said a masked Fatah gunman who gave his name as Abu Abbas.

The orders finally came last night in a statement from the Fatah-controlled National Security Forces.

"Advance the forces. Confront the seekers of the coup. The patience of the security forces is over and we will react with all our strength," the statement said.

But those Fatah-supporting soldiers holding on to their remaining neighbourhoods in Gaza City seemed nervous and edgy.

As Egyptian mediators desperately attempted to avert a full-blown civil war, bursts of machine gun fire, exploding rocket propelled grenades and cannon booms echoed around the city for the fourth day in a row.

In the past 48 hours 19 Palestinians have been killed, tossed from rooftops, executed at point-blank range, and shot in hospital wards. That number seems certain to rise. More than 80 Palestinians have now been killed since mid May.

Among yesterday's dead was a 14-year-old boy and three women, all killed in a Hamas attack on a Fatah security officer's home.

"They're firing at us, firing RPGs, firing mortars. We're not Jews," the brother of Jamal Abu Jediyan, a Fatah commander, pleaded during a live telephone conversation with a Palestinian radio station.

Minutes later both men were dragged into the streets and riddled with bullets.

The fighting has spread to the West Bank where Fatah militants from the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades kidnapped a deputy minister from Hamas and seized control of a Hamas-run TV station.

Terje Roed-Larsen, the UN envoy to the Middle East, said: "The picture which emerges is very dark, and apparently getting darker. There are reasons for real concerns in the international community."